The Royal
Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2004 "for the discovery
of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation" jointly to Aaron Ciechanover,
Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose

It
has long been clear how proteins are built up in the
cell. But the opposite, how they are broken down, was long
thought to be less exciting to study. This year's Nobel Laureates,
Aaron Ciechanover, Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose, went against
the stream and, at the beginning of the 1980s, discovered
one of the cell's most important control mechanisms, controlled
protein degradation.